Ridgefield Liberty Cooperative

How will we determine what question is the most thoughtful?

We admit that there is no objective way to make that determination.  The determination will be made according to the combined subjective judgements of the members of our panel of judges.

We started sending invitations to prospects for the panel of judges on October 5 and as of October 16 the following individuals have agreed to be on the panel:

(1) Gene Epstein, Economics Editor for Barron’s magazine and former senior economist at the New York Stock Exchange.

(2)  Allen Morton, Dean of the Ancell School of Business, Western Connecticut State University.

(3)  Thomas McMorran, Principal of Joel Barlow High School.

(4) Charles Dumais, Principal of Newtown High School.

(5) Jess Gaspar, Managing Director in the Fixed Income and Commodities group at Commonfund and former professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business where he taught international economics and computational methods in economics and finance to MBAs and PhDs. Jess earned his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1990 and his doctorate in economics from Stanford in 1997.  Recently, he coauthored Commodity Investing: Maximizing Returns Through Fundamental Analysis published by Wiley Finance in 2008.

(6) Nick Perna, member and founder of Perna Associates, a consulting firm specializing in economic analysis, forecasting and strategy, and formerly an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and GE.  Mr. Perna has also served as Chief Economist for Fleet Financial Group, Shawmut and Connecticut National Bank.   He has taught at Williams College and NYU’s Stern School of Business.  Mr. Perna currently conducts a seminar on the U.S. banking system at Yale.  In January 2001, he became Economic Advisor to Webster Financial Corporation.

(7) Lorrie Rodrigue, Principal of Pomperaug High School, a regional high school serving Middlebury and Southbury.

(8) Bryan Luizzi, Principal of Broookfield High School.

(9) Richard Emerson, Judge of Probate, District of Redding, and Partner in Gager, Emerson, Rickart, Bower & Scalzo, a law firm with offices in Southbury and Bethel, Connecticut.

Invitations have gone to educators, economists, media representatives, politicians and other members of the community.

There will be no opportunity for favoritism based on personalities or personal relationships as the identities of the authors of the questions will not be disclosed to the judges.  Questions will be coded (with a number similar to a personal identification number or PIN) and then forwarded to the judges for consideration.  Each judge will score each question on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being the best score).  We will combine all the scores for each question to get a total.  The question with the highest score wins.

We may modify this procedure by identifying the top contestants (perhaps five to ten) via such a scoring system and going through another round of scoring for the top contestants.

We do not anticipate that the judges will need to travel or meet with each other.